“Pain is the price we pay for being alive. Dead cells—our hair, our fingernails—can’t feel pain; they cannot feel anything. When weunderstand that, our question will change from, “Why do we have to feel pain?” to “What do we do with our pain so that it becomesmeaningful and not just pointless empty suffering? How can we turn all the painful experiences of our lives into birth pangs or intogrowing pains?” We may not ever understand why we suffer or be able to control the forces that cause our suffering, but we can have alot to say about what the suffering does to us, and what sort of people we become because of it. Pain makes some people bitter andenvious. It makes others sensitive and compassionate. It is the result, not the cause, of pain that makes some experiences of painmeaningful and others empty and destructive.”

“Is there an answer to the question of why bad things happen to good people?...The response would be…to forgive the world for not being perfect, to forgive God for not making a better world, to reach out to the people around us, and to go on living despite it all…no longer asking why something happened, but asking how we will respond, what we intend to do now that it has happened.”

“Our awareness of God starts where self-sufficiency ends.”

“Sooner or later, we all learn that our immortality is rooted not in our professional involvements and achievements, but in our families. In time, all of our wins and losses in the workplace will be forgotten. If our memories endure, it will be because of the people we have known and touched.”

“Do things for people not because of who they are or what they do in return, but because of who you are”

“If that were God's plan, it's a bad bargain; I don't want to have to deal with a God like that...My sense is God and I came to an accommodation with each other a couple of decades ago, where he's gotten used to the things that I'm not capable of and I've come to terms with things he's not capable of...and we care very much about each other.”

“I think of life as a good book. The further you get into it, the more it begins to make sense.”

“Perhaps they suspected that I thought less of them because I knew it. (I'm too aware of human frailty to have let that happen. If anything, I thought more of them for wanting to face up to what they had done and for trying to change.)”

“(Many religions, from Judaism to Zoroastrianism, use light and fire as symbols for the presence of God, perhaps because light, like God, cannot be seen but permits us to see everything there is, perhaps because fire liberates the energy hidden in a log of wood or a lump of coal just as God liberates the potential energy to do good things that is hidden in every human being, just as God will be the fire that burns within Moses, enabling him to do the great things he will go on to do, but not consuming him in the process.)”

“God is the One who is with us when we have to do something we don't think we are capable of doing.”

“Perhaps that is the only cure for jealousy, to realize that the people we resent and envy for having what we lack, probably have woundsand scars of their own. They may even be envying us.”